A Yemeni airliner with 150 people on board has crashed in the Indian Ocean near the Comoros archipelago, officials there say.
"We don't know if there are any survivors among the 150 people on the plane," the Comoros vice-president told Reuters news agency.
The plane belonged to Yemeni state carrier Yemenia Air, he said.
The three islands of Comoros are about 300km (190 miles) northwest of Madagascar in the Mozambique channel.
Vice-president Idi Nadhoim, speaking from the airport at the main island's capital Moroni, said the accident happened early on Tuesday.
The exact location of the plane was not immediately known.
The details of the flight are also unknown, but there was a flight from Sanaa, the capital of Yemen, due about 0230 (0030 BST). That flight was a connecting flight from Paris.
A resident near the airport told the BBC about 100 people were trying to get into the airport to find out more information, but without much success.
Girl, 14, is only survivor after Airbus carrying 153 people crashes into Indian Ocean
By David Williams
Last updated at 6:40 PM on 30th June 2009
A 14-year-old girl had an extraordinary escape today after surviving a plane crash and several hours floating in the Indian Ocean after an airliner plunged into the sea.
She was aboard a flight travelling from the Yemeni capital Sanaa, where there had been a change of planes, to the Comoros Islands, a former French colony off the southeast African coast, 190-miles north of the island of Madagascar.
All the other 152 passengers and crew aboard the Yemenia Airbus 310 were believed to have been killed.
The disaster brought immediate calls for a world blacklist of carriers deemed unsafe after it emerged France had banned the plane from landing on its soil.
It comes two years after aviation officials reported faults with the aircraft and the EU voiced concerns over the safety record of Yemenia, which is owned by the Yemeni and Saudi governments.
The unnamed girl was from a village in the centre of the Indian Ocean archipelago.
Earlier reports had suggested the only survivor was a five-year-old boy but this was contradicted by a government minister.
Comoros Communications Minister Abdourahim Said Bakar said: 'A doctor from the military hospital aboard one of the rescue boats called the Mitsamiouli hospital to tell them a child had been rescued alive.'
There were 66 French nationals aboard Flight IY626, which began its journey in Paris.
The crash is said to have happened in strong winds after the Yemeni pilot of the 19-year-old plane made a second attempt to land at Moroni, the capital of Njazidja, the largest of the three Comoros islands.
Yemeni civil aviation deputy chief Mohammed Abdul Qader said it was too early to speculate on the cause and the flight black box data recorder had not been found, but the wind was 40 miles per hour as the plane was landing in the middle of the night.
'The weather was very bad ... the wind was very strong,' he said, adding the windy conditions were hampering rescue efforts.
The Yemenia plane is the second Airbus to crash into the sea in as many months.
An Air France Airbus A330-200 crashed into the Atlantic Ocean on May 31, killing all 228 people on board, as it flew from Rio de Janeiro to Paris.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy 'expressed his deep emotion' about the crash and asked the French military to help in the rescue operation. The plane is said to have vanished in 'deep sea'.
A crisis centre once again was set up at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris. Many passengers were from the French city of Marseille, which has a large Comoros community.
Relatives of those on board expressed anger at the state of the airline's planes.
One waiting at Charles de Gaulle said: 'They put us aboard wrecks, they put us aboard coffins.
'That's where they put us. It's slaughter.'
Yemeni Transport Minister Khaled Ibrahim al-Wazeer stressed the plane, which had accumulated 51,900 flying hours, had undergone a thorough inspection and conformed to international standards.
But French Transport Minister Dominique Bussereau said that faults were discovered when the plane was inspected in 2007 by the French transport authorities and that the plane had not returned to France since then.
'The company was not on the blacklist but was subject to stricter checks on our part, and was due to be interviewed shortly by the European Union's safety committee,' he said.
'A few years ago we excluded this plane from national soil because we considered that it had a number of irregularities.
The question we are asking... is whether you can collect people in a normal way on French territory and then put them in a plane that does not ensure their security. We do not want this to happen again.'
Many of the passengers, including three babies, began their journey in Paris aboard a different Yemenia plane, an A330. They switched to the A310-300 with a crew of 11 in Sanaa.
A European Commission official said the crashed plane had sparked an inquiry into the Yemenia airline's safety record.
EU Transport Commissioner Antonio Tajani said Yemenia had passed the necessary checks to avoid a ban on operating in the 27-nation bloc, but that EU experts would ask it to explain what had happened in the Comoros accident.
The commissioner said he would propose to other world airline authorities the creation of a global airlines blacklist, adding : 'If we want to achieve better safety, I am convinced that we need to have a worldwide blacklist.'
The EU suspended permission for Yemenia to maintain EU-registered planes in February after it failed a set of audit inspections.
The move would not have affected the Airbus A310 plane which crashed since that aircraft was registered in Yemen.
But it provides further evidence of European concerns over the airline's operations after the EU Commission said the plane which crashed had sparked an EU inquiry two years ago.
The A310-300 is a twin-engine widebody jet that can seat up to 220 passengers. There are 214 A310s in service worldwide with 41 operators.
The child survivor of the Yemenia jet crash which killed 152 today spoke of her ordeal as she flew back to France for an emotional reunion with her father.
Bahia Bakari told a French government minister that she felt something 'like electricity' before the crash.
'She says instructions were given to passengers and that then she felt something like electricity ... as if she had been a bit electrocuted,'
The airliner crashed into the sea and the wreck of the plane is believed to be at a depth of more than 300 metres.
"The difficulty in retrieving bodies is because the plane is located some 300 to 400 metres (deep) and at a spot difficult to access," Comoros Red Cross spokeswoman Ramulati Ben Ali said.
The French and US navies have provided ships and divers to help in the search. Neighbouring Madagascar has also provided search equipment.
On Wednesday, search teams detected signals from the jet's distress beacons, but had yet to locate the black box flight recorders.
A Comorian official told the London based al-Sharq al-Awsat newspaper that they are not ruling out the possibility that the Yemenia Airbus 310 was shot down with a missile, ensuring that the French Ambassador in Moroni told some top Comorian government officials that there were French Navy vessels performing maneuvers in the area of the accident a day before the plane crash. He also accused French navy authorities of intentionally driving the rescue teams away from the accident area.
President Sambi drew the audience’s attention to the issue that France is not showing enough cooperation for the rescue of survivors, recovering bodies, and cleaning up the wreckage from the plane at a meeting held by the Comorian government’s rescue teams yesterday at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
He said that there has been no progress achieved in discovering or recovering survivors and their property, ensuring that the French know exactly where the wreckage is located, but are directing the divers to other areas.
He added that rescue teams were formed from divers of the four countries of France, Yemen, USA and Comoros; however, their access to the crash site has been limited. A French submarine spotted the wreckage but the government has denied access to it through ambiguous ways.
Sambi added that the quick, French withdrawal of the surviving French girl Bahia al-Bakri aroused suspicions because she is the only eyewitness of the accident.
"We have unofficial information from French war vessels in the area which were presumably conducting undeclared military maneuvers near the plane,” said the Comorian official, adding that “Perhaps the plane was at the wrong hour and place at that moment.”
He said that this story has been circulating within Government agencies, adding that the girl told one of her rescuers of her hearing a large noise and a large explosion coming from outside the plane. The French feared this, and in response, quickly sent a Minister to ensure that the only survivor would not say things detrimental to the French military and government.
He went on to say that it is in the favor of France that the bodies stay underwater for a long time, so as to not disclose what happened.
French Navy Locates Black Boxes of Crashed Yemenia Airways Plane
Thursday , July 23, 2009
PARIS — A French navy vessel has detected the black boxes of a Yemenia Airways plane that crashed into the Indian Ocean near the Comoros Islands, the ship's captain said Thursday.
Comoran and French authorities, meanwhile, were still investigating the cause of the June 30 crash that left a 12-year-old girl as the only known survivor out of 153 people aboard.
The "Beautemps-Beaupre" hydrographic and oceanographic frigate mapped the sea floor and handed its finding over to Comoran authorities and to the French aviation agency BEA, ship Capt. Marc Reina told The Associated Press.
"A cartography has been completed and the recorders have been pinpointed," Reina said by phone from the French island of Reunion in the Indian Ocean, where his ship has docked before returning to its base in Djibouti.
The plane's cockpit voice and flight data recorders, known as black boxes, could help explain why it crashed as it tried to land in heavy winds. But they lie in waters too deep for divers, requiring specialized robots to bring them up to the surface.
Reina said underwater robots sent by the French navy to Comoros should begin operating in August.
Yemenia Flight IY626 crashed on its way from San'a, Yemen, to Moroni, Comoros. Many of those aboard were from France's Comoran community and had embarked in Paris or Marseille before changing planes in Yemen.
French Comoran community leaders have complained that Yemenia Airways planes weren't safe. Yemenia officials have denied the claim and complained that French authorities helping with the search for debris and bodies have not been sharing their findings with Comoran and Yemeni authorities.
Investigators have found wreckage from the plane near two Kenyan islands, hundreds of miles away from the Cormoran archipelago. At least 27 bodies had been recovered, including some that had drifted to Tanzania, according to Yemen's aviation accidents committee.
